Caveat Googleor - Don't Believe Everything You Find Online

I was exchanging emails with another member a few days ago and he expressed concern that a report he had found online suggested that one of the medicines he was scheduled to start taking had been shown to cause metastatic prostate cancer in some cases. I volunteered to look at it. Here's the link if you want to look at it too.

www.ehealthme.com/ds/eligard/prostate+cancer+metastatic

It leads to a "report" entitled "Could Eligard cause Prostate cancer?" that he found alarming. His urologist was putting him on Eligard short term to keep a lid on his cancer while he decides on a treatment option but has not prescribed Casodex first and my correspondent was concerned about testosterone flare. This report made him more worried yet.

The thing to know about this website is that it watches what people are searching for on search engines and then generates a nearly-meaningless page that superficially looks like what they think people want to know. I gets its data from public statistics from the FDA. It does simple-minded queries and produces a nice-looking report with almost no semantic intelligence used in its creation.

Here's a link to a report that Vitamin D causes pregnancy.

www.ehealthme.com/ds/vitamin+d/pregnancy

And the obvious one...

www.ehealthme.com/cs/penile+discharge/pregnancy

It will give your a report for Prostate Cancer in women

www.ehealthme.com/condition/women/prostate+cancer+metastatic

and pregnancy in men

www.ehealthme.com/condition/men/pregnancy.

(It's surprising how many symptoms pregnant men report. What a bunch of whiners we are...)

The website is endless fun to play with. The reports it produces look professional but are almost meaningless. They are mostly just a come-on to get people to click on their advertising links while looking for more information.

There are a number of these websites that hover over search engines, watching for people looking for medical information like vultures hovering over a highway watching for roadkill.

There's a lot of good information available online but one must be skeptical.

Which is why most good doctors laugh when patients tell them that they read "so and so" on the web.

david

wait - are you trying to cast doubt on the fact that Elvis was abducted by aliens, cloned and returned to 50 wedding chapels in Las Vagas?

:)

Well done, Peter.

I demand that they double your salary.

Mel

Galileo said...
There's always the threat of dihydrogen monoxide.
www.dhmo.org/facts.html

Not seen it either Galileo: Perfect example of misleading information

Dihydrogen monoxide can ruin a good whiskey too.

Alf

PeterDisAbelard said... There's a lot of good information available online but one must be skeptical. PeterDisAbelard, you have made a nice point about using appropriate caution.  I would merely add to your comment...     A “healthy skepticism” of the information one finds from any source is, well…healthy. That skepticism has also, at times, been taken to extreme, which is probably, well…probably unhealthy. For example, anybody who writes, as was once posted here at HW, that “statistics are lies”…should probably be kept at arms length.   The internet is a great source of information, but one should apply common sense . There are a lot of men & women who are looking to fill the deficits in their new education about prostate cancer (indeed, the advice we often give newcomers is to “educate yourself” on all aspects this new topic which has instantly begun to consume a significant portion of their waking moments).   If they apply common sense , the internet can be their friend. Furthermore, while some men here are fine just leaving everything in the hands of their doctors’ conventional medicine tactics, many others are interested in steps they can take on their own to help “stack the odds in their favor” by doing just a little bit more than the average patient to reduce their risks and improve their individual case.   Again, with a little common sense , the internet can be their friend. The advice I have previously shared here at HW (don't confuse my advice as "medical advice"; it's just common sense advice) to others regarding this general topic of using the internet to search for information about prostate cancer is to “ look for the accumulating mountains of good evidence .” Most of the new ideas start with just a single report or medical study…but the good ones begin to accumulate a base of data   which surrounds the original concept.   Other institutions, other doctors, other studies result in building evidence of support.   The bad concepts tend to fade away, or are published only in marginal media. Dr Mark Moyad (a PC specialist from Univ of Mich) made a common sense comment similar to mine about looking for the "accumulating mountains of evidence" when he wrote this piece in the June 2011 PAACT newsletter.  This comment is important to understand for anyone wishing to read online studies : “Also, there is one more thing my friends that you need to know about medical studies. Never let 1 negative study that hits the media convince you that most positive studies are wrong. In other words, medical research is like a courtroom in that the majority of the evidence usually points in the direction of truth (except in that older television series “Matlock” where he always had just a little bit of evidence but still never lost a case). Once in a while you may hear a study about eating fish or fish oil and how it may not help or may hurt cancer patients, but this does NOT eliminate all the heart healthy and overall healthy benefits of fish for most people including cancer patients. In other words, 1 negative study is just that, 1 negative study. It does not represent the majority of the evidence for fish and should not be treated as fact .”   Post Edited (Casey59) : 3/6/2013 8:42:23 AM (GMT-7)

Casey,

I admire and envy your decisiveness and your ability to make categorical statements. [So that's the tag for underlining. I've never underlined anything here before.] I envy them because I am too much possessed by the imp of the perverse to achieve them myself. I seldom see a definite statement without starting to wonder if it is entirely true or always true and I irresistibly start to argue back the other way.

I agree, for instance, that in science one looks for the preponderance of evidence and should not let a single finding sway our ideas too much until other people have replicated the result. That said, there are fads and shared delusions in science that sometimes accumulate critical mass and are surprisingly hard to dislodge. As an example, I think you know that I am a dietary heretic. At least in terms of the causes and management of obesity I think the consensus opinion of the scientific community is all wet. I think that, after fifty years of doubling down on previous mistakes, the community is starting to come around but the researchers I follow are still very much in the minority.

I also agree that our members should educate themselves about the science behind their conditions. But for me it is always in terms of finding things to ask their doctors about, and being able to converse with their doctors on a more informed level. There are a couple of guys here who, if they turn their mighty brains loose on the conundrums of prostate cancer for long enough, can tell their urologists and oncologists things they may not have known. But there is also the problem of a little bit knowlege being a dangerous thing. Relying on ones doctors is more than just a personality quirk, it can also be a well-reasoned admission of the limited value of a few months of 4 am insomniac online "research" by a frightened man or a worried wife with no previous technical background.

I realize you are simply calling for common sense and I think I agree (although now that I've underlined it even that term suddenly looks suspicious to me). But one of the areas where we should use common sense is in deciding how smart we think we are, individually and collectively, and being humble when talking to our doctors. Scornful arrogance we should reserve for dealing with meaningless websites like eHealthMe.com

and pregnancy in men

www.ehealthme.com/condition/men/pregnancy.

i am crushed. i thought the movie "junior" with arnold schwarzenneger was real.

MauiViv,

Right you are http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110216/

And since I found this on the web, I know it's true :)

Pat

Peter

Ehealth - geesh - definitely a website to avoid!

Superb post - thank you!

Hugs

Bud

We will beat this crap